Climate Change Could Save the Rust Belt

As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt—sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on fresh water in its lakes and rivers, more than 20 percent of that water was right here. From a climate standpoint, there couldn’t be a safer place in the country—no hurricanes, no sea-level rise, not much risk of wildfires. That explains why models suggest many more people will soon arrive here.

My destination was the working-class city of Ypsilanti, and a meeting with Beth Gibbons, an urban planner and specialist in climate adaptation. Gibbons served as the founding executive director of a planning consortium called the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP), which was formed in part to consider how the country could anticipate and prepare for large-scale American climate migration. Gibbons believes that sooner or later a growing chunk of the nation’s population will be arriving in the Great Lakes region. Ypsilanti was an interesting place for us to meet: Many Black migrants from the South had moved here in the 20th century, and during World War II, some were employed building military aircraft. Now the city stands to be transformed again, this time by a great climate migration.

Across the Great Lakes region, cities were in their prime six decades ago as America forged its industrial might. But places such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Duluth have been in a steady decline ever since. And Ypsilanti, with its nest of underutilized streets, relatively cheap housing, and sprawling industrial spaces still belying the fact that its population peaked in 1970, is little different. That means—at least in theory—these cities have, in a word favored by planning types and scientists, “capacity” for more people.

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As climate change brings disasters and increasingly unlivable conditions to growing swaths of the United States, it also has the potential to remake America’s economic landscape: Extreme heat, drought, and fires in the South and West could present an opportunity for much of the North. Tens of millions of Americans may move in response to these changes, fleeing coasts and the countryside for larger cities and more temperate climates. In turn, the extent to which our planet’s crisis can present an economic opportunity, or even reimagining, will largely depend on where people wind up, and the ways in which they are welcomed or scorned.

Gibbons, who now works at the climate consulting firm Farallon Strategies, sees Michigan’s future in the Californians unsettled by wildfire. Those people are going to move somewhere. And so they should be persuaded to come to Michigan, she says, before they move to places like Phoenix or Austin. The Great Lakes region should market itself as a climate refuge, she thinks, and then build an economy that makes use of its attributes: the value of its water, its land, its relative survivability. In her vision, small northern cities, invigorated by growing populations, somehow manage to blossom into bigger, greener, cleaner ones.

“There’s no future in which many, many people don’t head here,” Gibbons told me. The only question is whether “we don’t just end up being surprised by it.” And so Gibbons wants to see the Great Lakes states recruit people from around the country, as they did during the Great Migration. Back then, recruiters spread across the South to convince Black people there that opportunity awaited them in the factories of the North: That’s what helped make Ypsilanti.

Today, long after the bomber factory was reduced to weed-riddled expanses of abandoned pavement, the town lives on. This time, the Great Lakes’ water is what will persuade people to move here: Humans have long migrated in pursuit of fresh water. Temperature will also make Michigan an attractive destination for climate migrants. For the coldest places, global warming promises newfound productivity and economic growth. The research connecting economic activity to cool temperatures suggests that there is an optimum climate for human productivity, and as ideal conditions for humans shifts northward, some places may soon find themselves smack in the middle of it. The same research suggests that when that happens, people are bound to follow.

These are the findings of Marshall Burke, the deputy director of the Center for Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. A notable 2015 paper he co-authored in the journal Nature earned international attention for predicting that most countries will see their economies shrivel with climate change. Less noticed, however, was what Burke found would happen on the northern side of that line: Incredible growth could await those places soon to enter their climate prime. Canada, Scandinavia, Iceland, and Russia could see their per capita gross domestic products double or even quadruple.

The United States is on the cusp of this dividing line between economic loss and fortune—its southern regions more imperiled, its northern latitudes much better positioned to capitalize on climate change. Proprietary climate models from the Rhodium Group, an environmental- and economic-research firm I collaborated with for this book, forecast that even as commercial crop yields free-fall across the Great Plains, Texas, and the South, those closer to the Canadian border will steadily increase. By as soon as 2040, yields in North Dakota could jump by 5 to 12 percent. In Minnesota and Wisconsin and northern New York, the rise could be closer to 12 percent. By the end of the century, should climate change be severe, those increases could jump by 24 to 30 percent. Shaded on Rhodium’s map, the data show a dark hot spot where agricultural improvements will far outpace anywhere else in the country. It is centered like a bull’s-eye right over the Great Lakes.

[Read: Climate change is already rejiggering where Americans live]

Indeed, big commercial agricultural companies and other land investors may already be anticipating this. Over the past several years, land values have skyrocketed across the upper Midwest, as buyers including Bill Gates have snatched up thousands of acres of farmland. To the south, they see the Ogallala Aquifer being depleted, and in California, regulatory mandates potentially reducing water consumption in the Central Valley by 40 to 50 percent, while in northern Michigan, there is more water than anyone knows what to do with.

The Rust Belt arguably led America’s industrial revolution, and with the push of new government support, this same region could help lead a green revolution. The Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s historic climate legislation, has promised roughly $370 billion in subsidies for electric vehicles and clean energy, an injection of cash that has already spurred many billions more in private investment and revitalized the country’s manufacturing base. As of late last year, Michigan was the third-largest recipient of that investment. Following the IRA incentives, automakers have collectively invested tens of billions of dollars in the electric-vehicle supply-chain, and the federal government has made some $2 billion in grants available to retrofit and modernize old factories to produce electric vehicles.

Imagine the economic center of gravity of the United States shifting north, and the seesaw effects of that change on the geographic locus of American society. Consider again the lasting cultural implications—for music and arts and sports and labor—of the previous century’s Great Migration out of the South, and what doubling it could mean. One day, a high-speed rail line may race across the Dakotas, through Idaho’s up-and-coming wine country and the country’s new bread basket, to the megalopolis of Seattle, which will have grown so big as people move north that it has nearly merged with Vancouver, at the southern edge of Canada. Never mind that roughly half the country will likely have to experience total upheaval or extreme discomfort—or both—to arrive at this point, or the fact that by the time the Great Lakes region reaches its apex, much of the nation’s southern half will have withered. And of course, every place in America will experience dramatic change and disruption from warming—just look at Canada’s wildfires last summer. But the northern part of the U.S. is more shielded from the primary threats of sea-level rise, hurricanes, drought, and extreme heat. The vision amounts to what Beth Gibbons describes as a chance to shift the climate narrative away from one of exclusive failure. And it suggests that the displacement erupting from climate stress in some places will put others on track toward greater security, wealth, and prosperity.

[Read: Vermont was supposed to be a climate haven]

An economic boom projected for warming regions, though, Burke told me, will also likely depend on a growing population in the region, which means peacefully resettling large numbers of climate migrants. That’s easier said than done. In Ann Arbor, an affluent city hoping and preparing for climate-driven population growth, I talked with the city’s sustainability director, who counted herself with Beth Gibbons among the optimists. She told me she thought Ann Arbor could be turned into a climate destination, but she was surprised to find that even in her hyperliberal, upper-class college town, some people didn’t necessarily want that.

Gibbons, too, was running into resistance at every turn. Michigan’s Native American tribes, corralled into a tiny sovereign territory, told ASAP focus groups that they see climate change not only affecting their hunting and fishing grounds but potentially bringing new people and economic forces into conflict with their tribal rights. Rural communities from northern Wisconsin to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula fear something similar; the migration during the coronavirus pandemic showed them how little newly relocated second-home owners are simpatico with longtime locals who depend on harvesting timber and working large farms to make a living.

Elsewhere in the United States climate migration is already leading to rising tensions between old and new, as smaller communities confront incoming numbers and rapidly urbanize. The seemingly best places have begun to attract the wealthiest and most mobile to resettle, even while the worst consequences of climate change in the U.S. disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. In Michigan, even some progressives worry that climate migration today will amount to climate gentrification; not so far down the line, forced migration could instead yield fears of newcomers as economic burdens.

Migration can be thought of as the decision to leave, the choice of where to go, and the arrival at the destination. But what history shows is that the most friction occurs in the transitions leading up to and following these things. There is the separation, a breakdown, like paper being torn. And there is the integration of new people into an existing community, a community that could receive that change as an injection of vitality and energy and economic investment, or as a burden and a stressor.

In part, that outcome depends on who is displaced. As Carlos Martín, then a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told an audience of planners who had gathered to discuss migration in 2020, it often takes time to know whether a place will welcome new settlers. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, people who resettled in Texas and elsewhere were greeted with empathy. A year later, though, talk of providing aid had shifted to questions about crime and competition for housing, code words for racial tensions. The sympathy turned to finger-pointing and anger. Sometimes it depends on who it is that’s arriving. Are they white or Black? Are they buying glass-curtain-walled condos, perhaps fueling gentrification but also goosing an economic boom? Or are they unemployed refugees looking for housing in the low-income suburbs? The answers shouldn’t matter, Martín says, but they do.

This article has been adapted from the book On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten.